Nicolas Sarkozy at last confirms bid for second term as president

Published on Thursday 16 February 2012 02:15

FRENCH president Nicolas Sarkozy has said he is to seek a second term in this year’s election, pledging last night to boost the country’s lagging economy and protect its way of life.

“Yes, I am a candidate for the presidential elections,” Mr Sarkozy said on national TV network TF1 last night.

For months, polls have shown Mr Sarkozy well behind front-runner François Hollande, the head of France’s Socialist Party.

Pollsters say the president will face an uphill battle to convince disillusioned voters that they should elect him again. He has only two months to change minds: The first round of the two-part vote is 22 April.

Mr Sarkozy had been widely expected to confirm his candidacy, but had kept his intentions quiet while other candidates have been campaigning for months.

In his announcement last night, Mr Sarkozy blamed French voters’ troubles in part on three years of financial crisis and said he would focus on getting more people working. He promised a referendum on jobless benefits and training the unemployed, and said further reforms are needed to maintain France’s “way of life”.

He said France cannot turn in on itself and “pretend the crisis doesn’t exist”.

France’s two-round presidential ballot in April and May is likely to have an impact throughout the European Union. Mr Sarkozy has been closely involved in the fight to save the euro amid a sovereign debt crisis in the bloc.

Earlier yesterday, Mr Sarkozy launched a personal Twitter account and thanked all those “who will kindly follow me”. Tens of thousands of people signed up to follow him within hours.

Mr Sarkozy’s looming candidacy has become one of France’s worst-kept political secrets. Media reported his Paris campaign headquarters are ready to go, with about a dozen presidential staff members set to move over, and he is expected to attend rallies for his UMP party in the Alpine town of Annecy today, and in the Mediterranean port city of Marseille on Sunday.

Pollsters suggest that Mr Sarkozy’s political problems are as much of his own making as France’s economic woes. Poll figures by IFOP agency show the biggest slide in his approval rating occurred during his first year – from 67 per cent in July 2007 to 41 per cent in March 2008 – and months before France was swept up in the fall-out of the international financial crisis.

Critics say Mr Sarkozy failed to deliver on promises to improve purchasing power, raised his own salary, and infused the gilded presidential palace with “bling” that was at odds with France’s cultural self-image.

On the night of his 2007 election, he celebrated at one of Paris’ most expensive restaurants; before taking office, he jetted off to spend a few days on a yacht owned by a super-rich French industrialist friend.

Later in 2007, Mr Sarkozy divorced his wife and began courting Italian former model Carla Bruni – including trips to Disneyland Paris and the Middle East with reporters in tow. In early 2008, Mr Sarkozy crudely insulted a passer-by at Paris’ biggest agricultural fair, an incident caught on video that led many to doubt his presidential calibre.

Frederic Dabi of IFOP said: “This doesn’t mean it’s all over, but there is a real difficulty for the incumbent president to win back the favour of public opinion.”

He said polls show that French voters are making their decisions even before Mr Sarkozy has entered the race – another sign that bodes badly for him.

Mr Sarkozy, who is considered pugnacious and impetuous, is bracing for a tough fight. His advisers say his prospects are “complicated” but that Hollande, while admittedly the favourite, can still be brought down.